All 45 face life imprisonment. They were arrested in February 2021. Their offence? They wanted to press for chief secretary Carrie Lam to be brought down for her obstruction of promised democratic reforms.
Under the national security law promulgated on June 30, 2020, that counts as subversion.
Only 13 were freed on bail and even they faced curfews and were barred from giving media interviews or meeting foreign officials or politicians.
Thus is Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” being forced on a once flourishing city and supposed special autonomous region with common-law traditions and democratic rights.
The national security law had the express purpose of stifling the democratic movement, root and branch. Remember the enormous public demonstrations in Hong Kong in the northern summer of 2019, beginning with the traditional, peaceful candlelit vigil to commemorate the many hundreds of victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989? The Beijing regime and its servants in Hong Kong perceived them as having all the makings of a colour revolution. They wanted none of it.
They have, since June 2020, gutted the electoral system so only compliant legislators can get elected to the Legislative Council or district councils. In fact, they cut the number of directly elected Legislative Council seats from 35 to 20 and increased the overall number of seats from 70 to 90, then ensured that government appointees and mainland stooges would fill those seats.
When such elections were held, in December 2021, only one non-establishment candidate got up. But the turnout was a record low 30.2 per cent. In 2016, it had been 58.28 per cent and, since 1991 the average turnout had been 47.8 per cent. In 2019, the democrats had swept 17 out of 18 district council elections. Once the repression started, there were mass arrests of democrats and those victories were overturned.
In September 2021 the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions was disbanded. Hundreds of “seditious” books were removed from public libraries. Major organs of the free press, Apple Daily, Stand News and Citizen News, were all raided by the police and had their assets frozen and their editors and managers arrested. All were shut down.
As you read these lines, editors of Stand News are on trial for sedition. Five speech therapists were arrested and jailed for publishing “seditious” children’s books. A film censorship ordinance was passed in October 2021, cracking down on the entertainment industry on the same control-freak grounds.
By such means are the millions of citizens of Hong Kong being dragooned into Xi’s way of governing the rest of China.
Melbourne China scholar Louisa Lim’s splendid 2022 book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong is defiantly dedicated “To all those who really f..king love Hong Kong”. Her book is an elegy to its vibrant and diverse energies. She lived there for years, knows it intimately, and evokes it as one might a remembered lover.
But she was forced to confess that the Chinese Communist Party is deleting it, step by step. She declares “in this national security era, writing about Hong Kong’s distinct identity is land-mined with risk”. She found she had to “remove some names and details from the text, to protect those with whom I spoke”.
Antony Dapiran, two years earlier, as the democracy movement surged and young heroes such as Joshua Wong openly called for a colour revolution, gave us City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong. That fight has been lost. And Chinese ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian brazenly declared at the National Press Club in Canberra last year that the same would be done to Taiwan in due course.
Do we want this kind of future imposed on Asia? Do we want to pretend that all this is just China being China and that our commercial interests dictate that we turn a blind eye to it all? What do we stand for in our part of the world? The trials and repressions that are part and parcel of the “China Dream” and that are happening right now will be our future if Xiao and his master have their way.
Conversely, Ian Johnson, in Wild Grass: China’s Revolution From Below (2021), looked for all the signs that Xi’s regime, precisely because it is expending hundreds of billions of dollars annually on repression and censorship, is built on bloodstained sand. That is the context for these political show trials. That is the context for our strategic misgivings – the context of AUKUS.
The challenge confronting us all, therefore, is to stand for a different future for Asia in general, for Hong Kong in particular, for Taiwan and for the long-suffering people of China ground under the heel of the CCP.
The challenge is to stare down Xi and dare to say to him: “No. Your dream is a nightmare and we’re not buying it.” If we cherish our liberties, we are all Hong Kongers now – just as John F. Kennedy declared in Berlin, to a huge, cheering crowd in 1961, that he was a Berliner. And living up to that is going to take something.
Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2023) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).
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A major political show trial is unfolding in Hong Kong. Sixteen democratic politicians who pleaded not guilty to subversion, when 29 others pleaded guilty as charged, are being tried before three hand-picked national security judges and no jury, in violation of common-law traditions dating back to 1845.